Roman Butrint

An Assessment

Inge Lyse Hansen, Richard Hodges

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781789258295
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Butrint, ancient Buthrotum, has taken many forms in different ages, shaped by the near-constant interaction between the place, its lagoonal landscape and the Mediterranean. Though Butrint does not appear on any of the records of early Greek colonization to identify it as a Corcyrean settlement, strong links must have existed between it and the metropolitan Corinthian colony of Corfu. Blessed with springs that possessed healing qualities, a small polis was created - extended to incorporate a healing sanctuary dedicated to Asclepius. Julius Caesar, harboring at Butrint in urgent need of supplies to sustain his struggle against Pompey, must have viewed the sanctuary, ringed by largely dried-out marshland, as the perfect site to settle veterans as a colony. It was an obvious cornerstone in controlling the passage from the Adriatic to the Aegean. The early settlers seem to have been limited in number and possibly mainly of civilian status. However, the political changes to the city's magistrature were immediate, and within a relatively short time-span fundamental changes to the physical make-up of the city were set in motion. Its new Roman status also located Butrint as a directly before the highest authorities in Rome, and within fifteen years or so, under Augustus's guidance following his victory at Actium, the city was refounded as a colony and awarded a pivotal role in Virgil's court-sponsored foundation epic, The Aeneid. Now linked to the Victory City of Nicopolis rather than in the shadow of Corfu, Butrint prospered. The urban fabric evolved, sometimes faltered, but was essentially sustained until the later 6th century A.D. This present volume is an assessment of the Roman archaeology, a compilation of studies and field reports that focuses upon the foundation and early history of the colony.

1 Introduction

Richard Hodges and Inge Lyse Hansen

Butrint, ancient Buthrotum, has taken many forms in different ages, shaped by the near-constant interaction between the place, its lagoonal landscape and the Mediterranean (cf. Figs 1.1 and 1.2). The exposed hilltop overlooking a deep-water lagoon abundant in fish has been an enduring feature in its many historical guises, and the site is an archetypal example of a port whose history was shaped by its context in the Mediterranean Sea.1 Indeed today, other than tourism, its main income as a place is still from fish, caught up in a web of rusting, communist traps.2 It is no surprise, then, to discover the lithic instruments of Neanderthal manufacture on the beaches surrounding the lagoon or that the hilltop is considered part of a network of late Bronze Age settlements in the region.3 It is no less unsurprising that the acropolis has yielded finds of mid-8th-century BC and late 7thcentury Corinthian pottery, providing evidence of the city’s part in Mediterranean-wide trade networks.4 Though Butrint does not appear on any of the records of early Greek colonisation to identify it as a Corcyrean settlement, strong links must have existed between it and the metropolitan Corinthian colony of Corfu.

Blessed with springs that possessed healing qualities, a small polis was created – extended to incorporate a healing sanctuary dedicated to Asclepius – and probably in the 3rd century BC the site became the administrative centre of the koinon of the Praesebes tribe.5 Julius Caesar harbouring at Butrint in urgent need of supplies to sustain his struggle against Pompey must have viewed the sanctuary, ringed by largely dried-out marshland, as the perfect site to settle veterans as a colony.6 It was an obvious cornerstone in controlling the passage from the Adriatic to the Aegean. Threatened by the prospect of new Roman colonists the city appealed to Titus Pomponius Atticus, who might have felt that his nearby estate would have been affected by new centuriation schemes. The early settlers seem to have been limited in number and possibly mainly of civilian status.7 However, the political changes to the city’s magistrature were immediate, and within a relatively short time-span fundamental changes to the physical make-up of the city were set in motion. Its new Roman status also located Butrint directly before the highest authorities in Rome, and within fifteen years or so, under Augustus’s guidance following his victory at Actium, the city was refounded as a colony and awarded a pivotal role in Virgil’s court-sponsored foundation epic, The Aeneid. Now linked to the Victory City of Nicopolis rather than in the shadow of Corfu, Butrint prospered. The urban fabric evolved, sometimes faltered, but was essentially sustained until the later 6th century AD (cf. Fig 1.3).

Butrint, with its long history, port facilities and connection to a lagoonal micro-region and (intermittently) the Mediterranean basin, conforms well to the criteria of commonality recently proposed by Nicholas Purcell.8 This approach, consciously re-framing Fernand Braudel’s concept of history over la longue durée, informed, as it happened, the Butrint Foundation’s project launched in 1994.9 This was designed as a multi-stage project involving multi-disciplinary analyses of the archives, archaeology and environment at Butrint, culminating in major open-area excavations in 2000–4.

This present volume is an assessment of the Roman archaeology, a compilation of studies and field reports that focusses upon the foundation and early history of the colony. On-going excavations in the area of the Forum as well as in the suburb on the Vrina Plain, as well as the preparation of full excavation reports on the excavations of the Triconch Palace and at Diaporit will very probably enlarge this picture of the ancient city in Roman times. Our intention now, though, is to illustrate the range of new information presently available for this period and to invite debate on its meaning for Butrint itself and its wider setting in the Adriatic Sea area.

Roman Butrint re-examined: 1994–2004

In his book Butrinto. Il mito d’Enea. Gli scavi the Italian archaeologist Luigi Maria Ugolini records how, sitting on the wall of ancient Mycenae in 1925, he mused upon on the links between Troy, Butrint and Rome.10 In his own account he had discovered Butrint in 1924 during travels with the precise scope of finding the ancient city of Helenus and Andromache – deliberately emulating, we may assume, Heinrich Schliemann’s achievement in unearthing Agamemnon’s home.11 Ugolini, a prehistorian by training, in his major excavations at Butrint from 1928–36 surprisingly gave little attention to either the early origins of the town and even less to understanding its Roman history. Instead, Ugolini’s real achievement was to establish a diachronic understanding of Butrint’s long history as a port situated on the Straits of Corfu.

Fig. 1.1 The regional context of Butrint (BF)

After his untimely death in 1936, his successors Pirro Marconi and Luigi Mustilli sustained Ugolini’s vision of a long-running centre, and neither, for example, opted to examine one of its episodes in greater detail. After the Second World War, much in admiration of Ugolini’s energetic efforts, Albanian archaeologists tended to rework details of Butrint’s long history, such as the phasing of its fortifications rather than reinterpret its history in any general form.12 This was the context for the Butrint Foundation’s project, which began in 1994.

The first phase of the project between 1994–99 concentrated upon evaluating the archaeological, historical and environmental sources.13 As a result a field survey of the immediate environs in 1994–96 established not only the remains of multi-period settlement around Butrint, but significantly, a large suburb or southern extension of the Roman settlement on the south side of the Vivari Channel.14 This suburb on the Vrina Plain had hitherto been interpreted as a villa by the Albanian Institute of Archaeology in deference to Ugolini’s interpretation of Butrint being confined to the promontory on the north side of the Vivari Channel.15 In April 1995 a preliminary geophysical survey of a section of the Vrina Plain was made by members of the Albanian Institute of Geophysics. The survey was inconclusive. In 1998–99 a further survey, made by Neil Chroston and Mark Hounslow from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, demonstrated that the area was occupied by a dense mosaic of buildings.16 Parallel to this research, a new survey was made of the monuments in the main town, and assessment excavations at various points indicated the calibre of the archaeological deposits.17

Fig. 1.2 The micro-region of Butrint (BF)

Fig. 1.3 Location of the principal monuments at Butrint (BF)

Other research linked to this evaluation included an exhaustive study of the archives pertaining to the work by Luigi Maria Ugolini, including his unpublished manuscripts.18 The material is mostly held by the archives in the Museo della Civiltà Romana in Rome, while an important collection of Ugolini’s photographs is housed in the Institute of Archaeology in Tirana. Following this, the Butrint Foundation reviewed the archives of the Institute of Archaeology to comprehend the scope of the post-war interventions at Butrint. In addition, the late Dhimosten Budina, head of the Institute’s Saranda office from 1959–90, was interviewed. Other archival research pertinent to this early assessment phase included a study of the maps, drawings and prints made by topographers and earlier visitors to Butrint. Being situated close to Corfu, with its long history of Venetian occupation followed by a French, then British governorship, the sources proved to be rich and illuminating.

The final part of the assessment phase included a study of the lagoonal history. Started by Sarah O’Hara, it was completed by Adrian Lane.19 These studies demonstrated a complex environmental history, much as N.G.L. Hammond anticipated in his seminal monograph on Epirus and similar to the more exacting survey made of the environment at Nicopolis, 200 km to the south.20 In particular, the survey indicated a significant drop in the water table in relation to the land in the second half of the first millennium BC and a reversal of this beginning in the later Roman period.

The present volume arises from the next stage in the Butrint Foundation’s research at Butrint. Since 2000 three investigations involving large-scale excavations have been made. First, a large part of an insula in the main town of Butrint, occupied by the later Roman Triconch Palace, was excavated between 2000–3.21 Second, a major multi-period settlement identified in the 1995–95 field survey at Diaporit on the south-east shore of Lake Butrint was extensively excavated.22 Third, the Vrina Plain suburb has been examined in detail. The Vrina Plain project has involved a sequence of different approaches. In 2000–1 the earlier geophysical survey was re-evaluated and test-trenches were excavated to evaluate the suitability of the remote sensing techniques. This was followed in 2002–3 when a length of about 200 m of a 1960s drainage ditch was cleaned and, in places, subjected to detailed excavation. This assessment excavation provided a cross-section through the settlement. In 2003–4, working from identified points in this assessment, several large areas were excavated revealing specific monuments within the occupation area.

An artistic impetus for re-evaluating the sculptural finds made by Ugolini in the late 1920s, and the development of Butrint as a Roman town, was provided by the find of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Richard Hodges and Inge Lyse Hansen
• The Artistic and Historical Evidence
• The Archaeological Investigations on the Vrina Plain
• Comparative Studies